Celebrating it on Saturday. It is very important to my wife to celebrate this tradition here in Germany. But the amount of work she puts into it is crazy. She is getting kinda sick, so I hope she stays more or less healthy and the weekend (with some people staying 3 nights) won’t take too much of a toll on her!
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Thanks! My partner and I just cooked for 4 hours so that my in-laws, our kids, and we could eat for 15 minutes.
And this was just keeping it simple because the whole family isn’t getting together until Sunday.
And then we’ll host my family on December 2nd.
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Thank you! Pushing it to the weekend but having a gathering to hopefully help my wonderful American partner feel a little at home over on this rainy parochial island.
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Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans. And happy Thursday to everyone else.
We made a bunch of food (“we” meaning mostly my wife, with me helping a bit here and there), as one of our friends lost her father recently, so we took enough for a full meal for four to her place before eating ourselves.
Next up: setting up the Christmas tree after the kids go to bed.
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No! It’s still November?
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It is after Thanksgiving! That means it’s Christmas-time!
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Well every year around Thanksgiving my wife starts listening to this New Hampshire and Maine radio station playing Christmas music 24/7.
They used to start this only after Thanksgiving but the last two years they already started the week before Thanksgiving.
My wife absolutely loves Christmas and Christmas music and because I love my wife, I take the ever present Christmas music in stride. I find that pretty difficult sometimes 
Some songs are great (Chris Rea’s Driving home for Christmas as an example) but a lot of them annoy me, especially after the 6th time listening to them 
So yeah, Christmas time officially started a week ago.
I also have to prepare the advent calendar for my wife over the next few days before the 1st of December.
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Christmas in my house, apart from the local town’s light switch on, starts after my birthday. So December 2nd.
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should we send earplugs?
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Yes, it is bad enough that as soon as Halloween is over we start getting Christmas decorations all over the place in town and shops. At home, we don’t set them up until well into December, always after my b’day on the 9th. And they stay till the 7th of January (they have to stay until the 3 Wise Men have been and dropped their presents on the 6th)
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3 Wise Men or Dreikönig is when we take down the decorations and the tree has well.
in my childhood my parents used to set up the tree in the 23rd and kept the room it was in locked until the evening if the 24th after church and dinner. a small bell would then ring that Christkind had been there to bring presents and then we would go in and the tree would be lit (acual candles) and there would be presents. but there was still another hurdle we had to do our Christmas performance which would either be a song or a poem. and then there were presents and we would get to play with them for the next few days. I remember getting up at 5 am on the
25th…
of course there were other decorations during Advent and the calendars and cookie baking and all that. these days we set up the tree maybe a week before Christmas and even that seems wrong to me.
Lebkuchen and other Christmas sweets after sold from early October. Everybody says they hate that it’s getting earlier every year but someone must be buying it… I usually wait until November before indulging.
Christmas Markets and town decorations will start next week. The week before 1st Advent 
at least in my town.
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That’s something that always leaves me speechless. Conifers tend to have loads of oils. The fire hazards…
Which makes me think, how come there is not a Christmas version of Flash Point: Fire Rescue with Christmas trees and mulled wines catching fire suddenly…
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I can imagine that not selling well.
“Here’s a Christmas themed game about a house being on fire and the fire service trying to rescue everyone inside. You lose if too many die, but some can die.”
How cheery
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we only had a fire once in all those years and not with the tree but with the Adventskranz 
by dad threw it out the window… onto the terrace no harm done.
We wouldn’t be using real candles. instead we have leds. much less hassle. but we still use real candles for the Advent decorations but they are always placed on some glass or metal plate with stuff that wouldn’t very likely catch fire.
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Really, all you’d need is a different marker for the hazmat.
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Regarding Christmas music, it’s a THING around here. We play it almost constantly from Thanksgiving to St Patrick’s day but periodically in between. Years ago I spent a lot of time collecting and curating music so we play my own mix. Mostly folk/indie/alt rock covers of known songs with some novel stuff thrown in. I could, in theory, post a link if anyone wants to download 300 or so mp3’s…
I could not take the Christmas radio station for more than a few minutes, though. Note: Mariah Carey is nowhere on my list.
OK. Other News.
Last Friday (17th) my father-in-law fell in his laundry room. Last Monday (20th) he was nauseated, headache, dizzy, etc. Ambulance called at 10:30. Arrived at 10:33. We aren’t clear on what happened between 10:33 and 4:00pm but he was at the hospital and it somehow took them that long to diagnose him. At 4:00 he was put on another ambulance to a bigger hospital and by around 4:30 he was in the OR for several hours to release and treat an aggressive brain bleed.
We only found out later but he was basically put on life support in the second ambulance and the surgeon told us 50/50 after the surgery but later confided he thought my wife’s dad was a dead man.
However, when he woke up his pupils were responding and he was able to squeeze hands and answer questions (hand signals) and react to voices and sentences. Next day they took the feeding tube/respirator out and he was able to talk. He’s out of the ICU now and should be on his way to rehab before tomorrow. That’s a lot of positive news dribbling out since last Monday night.
The ongoing challenge here is that my wife’s mom doesn’t have great English and, the bigger problem, isn’t a clear thinker. She’s never had a great grasp of reality with what is, what she thinks, and what she’s worrying about all getting about equal billing. She’s the reason we don’t know a lot of what happened as what she tells us is often obviously not true or contradicts what the doctors or nurses are reporting. My wife has one sister who has been up in New Jersey since Monday but has to come home soon. My wife went up there with the baby for a few days but it was hell on both of them, trying to manage feeding and sleeping schedules, take care of the baby who is NOT allowed in the hospital, etc. The baby will not yet take a bottle, as we failed to train her early on and now the suckle instincts are off.
Oh, also maternity ended last Wednesday so she’s trying to start work…
She needs to go back up to New Jersey to manage things. It’s going to be hell again, especially with her sister back here in DC. Milk supply will likely drop to dangerous levels and baby will not really get good naps. I’ll be mostly ok here, taking care of the older ones and working while the nanny is on duty.
We also don’t know how long this will last. It could be about a year for him to regain good functionality. We don’t know how we’re going to support through that timeframe.
It’s a lot. It’s really a lot. Especially with a baby.
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I’d be looking for the services of a bi-/multi-lingual (that speaks your mother in law’s native tongue) patient advocate to help navigate out-patient treatment and keep on retainer for any follow-up care and any future care advocacy needs.
A family friend of my partner’s family gave up nursing to become a full-time advocate and she was indispensable when my father-in-law recently ended up in the hospital – she identified, for example, an issue where two doctors treating different systems couldn’t agree on medication and dosing, and decided to just “compromise” and give both medications at half the intended dose; something the nurse would later confide with the advocate was actually serving no purpose and may be hindering the identification of underlying problems.
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I noticed the freezer door wasn’t quite closed, so I pushed it, with no effect. I opened the door, and the remaining door shelf fell off, and its contents fell to the ground. Fortunately, there was only one glass bottle, and it bounced off my foot.
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A glass bottle in the freezer?
I have Limoncello and Averna in the freezer…
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